1 de Dezembro

This month has been yet another month with a focus on polishing and improving the game. If you're just here to find out what new machines are added, then let me disappoint you immediately by saying 'none'. If, on the other hand, you feel that FortressCraft is already a massive and complex game, that's simply misunderstood at times by players, then read on!

Performance optimisations

Loads and LOADS of machine now dynamically load textures when needed. This should massively reduce the footprint of the game, as well as speed up loading substantially!

Texture footprint is down by 400 megs, a system has been implemented to easily, dynamically load textures in future, and main ram requirement has been reduced by several hundred megs.

Reduced texture usage in a number of places (for example, the light cookie on the snowman is no longer 4 megs in size)

Reduced texture footprint of minecarts-on-conveyor-belts by 25 megs.

Reduced size of explosions from the intro sequence by about 40 megs, and quietly wondered why Unity felt the need to keep them loaded.

Fixed a number of dynamic texture loads (It didn't work correctly when they were stored in a root folder)

Added a much more generic Material dynamic loading system; used it on the MagmaBore, saving ~160 megabytes of GPU ram. This memory WILL be used again if you build one, of course, but it means you're not carrying around unneeded textures. The code can also form the basis of a dynamically-unloading reference counted system. (I wish Unity

supported streaming textures like Unreal has since V3...)

All Turret textures now dynamically loaded.

All skins (player, ARTHER, Spider and Construct-o-Bots) are now compressed.

Unloaded resources are now dumped appropriately.

Fixed issue with magma bore gantry missing dynamic texture load

Quality of life improvements

The game now pauses when you enter the options menu. This is far from perfect, I'm afraid, but I've been continually badgered to add it, so here you are.

Added the Mission Report. You'll see this after the first 15 minutes of play, and it should tell you all sorts of interesting things about your base.

Type /missionreport at any point to see it, or /missions to disable it

Added 11 new categories of item, and reworked all the existing items into it! (Example, Power has become Power Generation, Power Storage and Power Transmission - much

easier!)

Added support for Named Ore Extractors in the Mission Report. Don't know how to name an Ore Extractor? Stick a sign next to it!

Fixed issue with too many mods installed - you can now reliably look through many pages of them. Best bug I've had to fix in a while! :)

Made high-packet-loss servers more robust by increasing packet loss threshold to 400ms

More helpfiles, thank you TabooRaver!

Completely replaced Crafting UI panel. (Specific) feedback welcome!

The 'first-hour' of missions has been substantially broken down for new players, and should guide them through locating their first resources, as well as completing scans.

Laboratories should now go to Idle, not Finished, when researching. This should allow you to auto-feed them any amount of items for Research Points, without human interaction. (Thanks to Flexible Games for this!)

Resin Handling now uses Green eyes from low level wasps and slimes.

Added support in serveroverrides.ini for WorldName - this should force the game to load in a specifically named world. Setting this will also no longer break the RCON password.

Working Night and Day doesn't let you know about progress so annoyingly often.

RCON commands are now passed to local server sim (this means that builderlist, etc, will work)

Known Issues

The conveyor count is incorrect on the Mission Report.

Recommendation is never "Fix your damned Ore Extractors"

Conveyor belts continue to animate when the game is paused, as do many other machines using SinRot or UVScrolling.

Tabbing away from the game whilst the inventory is open doesn't pause it.

Misc!

[Patreon-only]Added Pandora's Box mutator. Drop Pods will now drop between 1 and 150 items of questionable levels of use. There's a 1% chance of a LootSplosion, and that will drop 1-150 items of random types. Not all items are good, and can include really, really bad things.

Signs now marked as Glass, so you can transmit power through them.

Private servers now flag up dedicated/listen and linux/windows

Laser Borer should now play sound effects without error.

Threat should no longer do odd things when the game is paused

Mobs should no longer move when the game is paused (large benefit to autopause dedicated servers)

Added support for server overrides of minimum latency for 'lost packet' calculation, and for network buffer size.

Added BufferSize to serveroverrides.ini, which sets the outgoing server buffer size. This buffer is per-client, and defaults to 2000000 (2 megabytes). Decreasing this may decrease latency. Increasing it may increase reliability.

Added MinLatency to serveroverrides.ini, which sets the minimum threshold for which a packet is determined to be 'lost' - this defaults to 200. Increasing this number may give a slower gaming experience for clients, but should reduce the resends. If you are seeing players being kicked from your server, you can try increasing this. I would not recommend going above 1,000. Decreasing this number may cause large amounts of RAM bloating.

If the player has a suit heater, but has not progressed lower than -280m, they'll get a new mission : "Traverse the Cold Caverns"

Left-Clicking the crafting ingredients now jumps you to the appropriate sub-craft, or opens the help file if it's not craftable. Middle-clicking continues to open the help.

Accessing the handbook from within the crafting menu should now lock the mouse.

The in-game menu should now pause the game. You have 29 days to find issues with this before it goes live. This is an utterly terrifying and wide-ranging change that affects many, many threads, and can potentially cause all sorts of horrific issues, but I've been hounded into it.

30 de Novembro

It was all set for today, but, alas, it turns out that Todd and I broke the Suit Upgrade panel at the last moment. He's fixing that overnight, and I'll be making the builds tomorrow. Thank you for your patience! (If you're brave, you're welcome to opt into the Staging branch, there's only that single issue!)

In the meantime, here is what google assures me is 'The best pic ever'

Acerca deste jogo

"In a world where early access and indie usually means abandoned, unfinished garbage, this game's post launch development is outpacing many AAA titles and companies."

"This really isn't the same game that I originally purchased anymore. With all the changes that have been made over that duration the game is so much more fun
now that there are machines to alleviate almost every large build annoyance that used to exist. The FALCORs, thieves, excavators, drills etc.. all did so much for
automation it's almost hard to believe I ever did that stuff manually before."

FortressCraft Evolved’s Survival Mode is a unique-blend of Voxel Landscapes, Tower Defense, Crafting, Logistics, Exploration, Combat and Assembly lines. Players begin by crash-landing on a strange alien world, left with only a small handful of starting machines. Using hand-held scanners they must locate ore resources, place down Ore Extractors and Conveyors to automate the raw material back to the Smelter; take the fresh ingots through multi-machine assembly lines, followed by researching new technologies that help them explore thousands of meters below the planet's surface.

An advanced HoloBase allows players to keep an eye on their factory which they must defend against waves of alien attacks with multiple tiers of missile and energy turrets. To survive they must continue to develop new and unique power systems, from solar energy to Jet Turbines, culminating in crafting an Orbital Energy Transmitter thousands of cubic meters in size, to beam power off-planet, and start the next phase of the game.

And all this with an enormous draw-distance, scalable gameplay engine that is equally at home on high-end or low-end computers, and full multiplayer support! This does not even factor in all that you can do in the Creative Mode whose only limits are your time and imagination. With an array of Super Build Tools and a high-resolution Custom Detail Block Workshop players can build anything and on a massive scale unseen in other games.